1) Think of the beer you could buy with £300
2) Work out a schedule for drinking that beer, factoring in how long it is since you last got nobbled to speeding.
4) Now start the drinking. You won't be needing your car, so you won't get points.
There, that was easy.
ND
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Yup - Consider myself well and truly talked out of it!
Cheers ND
Adam.
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"Ah...beer - my only weakness - my achilles heel if you will"
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I would buy one, 'a friend of mine' has one and says it is about best of the bunch (excluding the GPS based ones). With the ever increasing number of accident blackspots appearing everywhere it has got to be a good idea to have one.
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Please excuse my ignorance Ian D. What is the connection between accident blackspots and a radar detector? There are very few bright yellow speed cameras in my part of the world, and where they are located they are clearly signed. Is this not always the case?
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Bit of a tongue in cheek comment from me as speed cameras are meant to be located at accident black spots but we know a lot of them are revenue raisers.
In my part of England mobile gotsos and camera vans pop up everywhere, the vans can normally be spotted but then mobile gatsos often not easily...
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Unfortunately not all cameras are bright yellow. If the police want a cut of the money collected they have to be visible, otherwise boring grey is OK. Try the Woodhead Pass from Manchester to Sheffield, loads of cameras, all grey and hidden in trees and behind signposts!
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I like your answer ND. A lot!!! However, I would spend the fist £75 or so on either IAM or ROSPA advanced driving which is the best insurance against getting a speeding ticket.
We\'ve all got perfectly good radar detectors built in - they\'re called eyes. If everybody obeyed speed limits for, say, 3 months:
a) speed cameras would dissapear in short time
b) the country would grind to a halt prompting a review of insane speed limits (what, exactly, makes a faceless beauracrat in some windowless office better able to tell me what is a safe speed on a road I am driving on and can see?)
c) it would become crystal clear that the \"speed kills\" slogan is much too simplistic.
Oh, and before I get flamed, I am not whiter than white - I tend to cruise at 80 indicated on the m-way, and 65-70 on NSL roads where appropriate. I do, however, always try to obey the limits where I am likely to get a ticket eg 30 in town, 40 / 50 on dual carriageways - and so far touch wood no nasty surprises in the post in the last 6 years / 120,000 miles. I also live in Southern Scotland where there are about 3 speed cameras within 100 miles......
I expect this thread will swell the ranks of one of the speeding threads shortly! {Correct. DD}
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RichardW
Is it illogical? It must be Citroen....
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It is an interesting point, though. The problem is putting it into effect.
If we could do so, the loss of scamera revenue for 3 months would be only a minor benefit. More seriously, there would (sadly) still be accidents on the roads - we all know that. What if that accident rate was not 1/3 lower? The statistical abuse that justifies the current approach to road safety and speed enforcement would then be exposed for what it is.
Can anyone think of a way to try it? I'd be game...
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Starting a campaign on t'internet seems like the most sensible solution.
I'm sure HJ could get it going in the motoring section... that would get picked up by other papers. Someone like JC off Top Gear would be another one to approach.
Perhaps starting it at Easter would be a good time? I was going to suggest the whole of April but I am sure it would have been mistaken for an april fool!
The tricky bit would be enforcement. There will be lots of people out there who think they're too important to stick to speed limits so those are the ones you would need to target. But I assume if you get enough people to do it then even on motorways the speeders wouldn't be able to speed as everyone would be moving in convoy. Which would create probably more danger than the normal motorway speeds so I would suggest that on multiple lane highways the inner lane goes at 60, middle at 65 and outer at an indicated 70. The argument then becomes how far out one's speedo is and whether you mean an actual 70 mph (absolute) or an indicated 70 (variable from vehicle to vehicle).
An idea to pursue I think though.
teabelly
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I must be missing something here...
Surely if everybody stops speeding then the cameras will be held up as a resounding success ? then they'll need to stay, then they'll need to be paid for but the money will come out of taxation rather than "fines".
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Mark,
And it would be extremely unfair to take the money out of taxation, which is applied to everone, as opposed to "fines" which only apply to the guilty, wouldn't it?
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I must be missing something here...
Mark,
The point is sadly a somewhat macabre one.
Speed cameras are justifed on the grounds that "speed kills". That statement is an oversimplification of the statistical conclusion that excessive speed is a factor in one third of accidents. That conclusion is, in turn, an upwards rounding of the 30% figure obtained by adding together a wide range of factors to which accidents were attributed, in surveys given to police officers attending road accidents. Those factors included 7.3% attributed to "excessive speed", but also include others ranging from "Failure to judge other persons path or speed" (10.7%) to "Weather" (0.8%) and "Other" (0.4%).
If we all observe speed limits but people keep on dying, or (at least) if the death toll drops by less than one third (say, 7.3% for example), then the fallacy of the "speed kills" message will be plainly exposed.
At present, HMG can point to the rising level of speeding tickets to explain why the death toll is not dropping - we are still speeding, speed kills, so people are dying.
If no (or very few) speeding tickets are issued for a protracted period then the absence of a significant drop in the death toll would be inexplicable if current policy is correct.
Alternatively, if the death toll did plummet then I for one would be shocked into a serious adjustment of my views on road safety.
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I see your point, but........
>>Alternatively, if the death toll did plummet then I for one would be shocked into a serious adjustment of my views on road safety.
Firstly, it probably would. As soon as everybody was paying attention and finding it all fun and interesting, accidents would drop. Its a pretty fundamental fact that measuring a change almost always results in an improvement.
It would return to previous levels of course, but for a period of time the accidents/injuries/deaths would drop. Not because people were driving slower, but because they were more interested and paying more attention.
However, the drop, however caused, would seal cameras in for ever.
In the event that the rates stayed the same or increased, then this would be held to be the fault of the \"irresponsible and dangerous\" protestors.
There is only one thing that will reduce/remove the cameras and that is public opinion especially insofar as it affects politicians.
Bear in mind it is a struggle to argue against one specific fact - that being that *any* accident would be less severe if the involved vehicles had been travelling more slowly. That is a fact. Of course, its incomplete and misleading, but when did that ever worry a politican. And what\'s more, there are responsible, mature, respectable people in this country who firmly believe in reducing the speed of cars. It matters not that their logic is flawed or wrong, it matters not that they take an unreasonable stand. It matters only that they believe it and that they are vocal.
The only way to win is to be more numerous and more vocal. That pretty much means that the attitude to your local politician is along the lines of \"I don\'t care what the stats say, I don\'t care what logic says, I will not vote for you if you don\'t take that camera out\".
Now, if he hears that often enough, he\'ll decide he needs to do it. At that point he\'ll find all the arguments, facts, figures, statistics that he needs without anybody having to convince him of their validity.
The problem with a large single protest is that the views heard on the media will, at best, be evenly split between the agrees and the disagrees. Because its interesting, then people will have an opinion. And in the interest of \"even-handed\" reporting then the views will be given equal airtime or whatever - making the event a waste of time, or at least ineffectual.
On the other hand, endless campaigns in newspapers, noticeboards, letters to politicians etc etc will not arouse the interest of those who disagree sufficiently for them to take up arms in defence of cameras, but will hammer the politicians where it hurts.
And to an extent that is happening. Of course there are always bogus clowns who do more harm than good; but a lot of the people raising awareness on this are normal people, and that\'s what you need.
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I'm not sure the accident rate would decline.
I agree that drivers would then be concentrating, but on what? I suspect that most of their focus would be on the speedo, not on the surroundings. That is not conducive to safety, to say the least.
There was a "safety" advert in Stockport which urged people to stick to 30mph exactly, and which was pulled on the quite reasonable grounds that it was in fact an unsafe way in which to drive. The reference is:
www.safespeed.org.uk/stockportad.html
Please do read the reply on the right hand side - it is truly inspired and I only wish I could write with such wit.
So a reduction in accidents would not be guaranteed, I think.
I completely agree with your reasoned dissociation of politics, facts, and statistics. The only aspect of that subject which I fail to understand is why politicians (a) act like this all the time and (b) ask why the rest of the UK population is so apathetic and disenchanted with politics.
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Agree with some, if not all, of what RichardW says...
I would suggest the "faceless bureaucrat" might know the history of that section of road, including accidents, injuries, deaths, profiles of traffic types and speeds, and maybe even the safe speed the road was designed to allow. He might also know how likely it is that there will be slow-moving farm vehicles attempting to turn in or out of partially-obscured lanes, or how awkward the junction ahead is for traffic trying to get out of a side road. None of these are obvious to a driver judging solely on the basis of what he can see at one point in time, but some people have the responsibility of taking into account more than one person's viewpoint.
My quibble, however, is that he will probably be forced to set the limit below what would be regarded as a safe speed because so many people habitually break speed limits anyway. So those who break the limit cause the artificially lower speed limits, then complain about them.....
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